Mike Orpen is the kind of guy who doesn’t like to complain about pain and doesn’t like to take any medication when he’s not feeling well.
If you ask him what it was like to be violently thrown from the back seat of a van and crack the centre console or to have a half skid of bricks land on him, he’ll tell you that it hurt ... and not much more.
When he would go to the hospital to get a shot of morphine injected straight into his back because he hadn’t slept for two days, his wife Lisa recalls that he would be in absolute agony. When the doctor would ask him how the pain was, his response would be, "Not bad."
When they would take him to triage and ask him to assess his pain on a scale of 1 to 10, he would answer "8."
"You were in so much pain, you couldn't do anything," Lisa chimes in. "You were a 10 if there ever was a 10."
When it comes to pain — physical and bureaucratic — the Orpens and their extended family know, unfortunately, whereof they speak.
It all started with the van accident in 1990, then the work-related accidents that the self-employed mason, who specializes in fireplaces, suffered.
He was diagnosed with neuropathic back pain. That’s a technical way of saying he was in agony because of stabbing pains in the small of his back and the rear of his thigh.
Despite his antipathy to medication, Orpen has taken some 24,000 pills since his ordeal began. We know because his sister, cum guardian angel, Caroline Dion, has kept track.
At the Orpens' home in Port Credit, where they live with son Quinn, who is almost 11 and daughter Remy, 12, the family sits down to try to explain to a reporter what life has been like since the pain started.
Because Orpen couldn't work and Lisa had to work full-time at her corporate sales job for Metroland Media, Caroline took on the burden of advocacy for her brother.
"She's my champion," says Orpen, who grew up in Erindale Woodlands, attending St. Gerard Elementary and then St. Martin's and The Woodlands.
Caroline has a binder several inches thick that is full of the details of Mike’s story. She developed his own time sheet and story line to save time explaining it to various doctors and medical authorities.
After back surgery that didn’t do the job, Mike did get some temporary relief when he discovered, through his mother’s chance reading of a Reader's Digest article, that there is something called neurostimulation therapy that could help him.
That involves implanting a unit that sends electrical pulses that block pain signals to the spinal cord. But that stopped working after about two years when the wires moved.
Orpen recalls with a laugh (You wonder how he still could do that) that desperation led him to try all sorts of quacky and quirky remedies, including being suspended upside down in a chair for an hour and sitting in a country garden near Guelph while a holistic healer played soft background music.
For the past six years, the Orpen clan has been trying to get a new unit implanted. Medtronic Inc. of Mississauga makes them. A recent study published by the international journal called PAIN found that patients can benefit significantly more from neurostimulation than conventional treatment.
You don't have to tell the 46-year-old Orpen that. Thanks to the persistence of his sister and his doctors and no thanks to a government policy that treats chronic pain sufferers like lepers because they aren’t going to drop dead of their pain in the next few months, Orpen got his surgery on – ironically enough — Oct. 10. Yes, that was the day of the provincial election.
Dion was particularly incensed during the process when her MPP, Kevin Flynn of Oakville, suggested to her that her brother consider out-of-country surgery.
The device is operating at only a fraction of its capabilities but, as he lies in a familiar prone position on the couch in the family living room, things are already a lot better for Mike.
For one thing, the meds have been significantly reduced and his head is clear. Maybe lying awake for two hours while they wiggled the wires around in his back to find exactly the right spot to do the maximum good was really worth it. The batteries are supposed to last nine years so it’s possible doctors might not have to go in through the large incision in his stomach (see photo) for that long, if it keeps working properly.
As his son Quinn gives him a big hug on his return from school, Orpen is thinking about things he hasn't dreamed of for some time: throwing the baseball around with Quinn, cycling with Remy and skiing the deep powder out west with Lisa.
Asked what price the family has paid because of her husband’s debilitating condition, Lisa Orpen who grew up in old Erindale Village, refuses to answer. "We try to focus on the positive things," she says.
Happily, there are a lot more of those to think about now.